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I have seen no serious effort to improve team communication in a long time, and I think it's a shame. A lot of you have probably played with me on Teamspeak, and I've received a lot of invites to merc corps. This post isn't about butt-hurt over not doing well at the game. My KDR and W/L are good, and I never even cared about stats. This is about the game not being fun for me anymore. What did I enjoy about the game before? Taking command.
I think it's a shame that most of the discussion on ECM has focused on the issue from the wrong angle. Most of the anti-ECM posts that I've seen focus on balance issues, TT, and suggested tweaks. While those concerns are valid, the real reason ECM is bad for the game is that it nukes what little information sharing we had. I used to run solo with pugs sometimes just to strengthen my mini-map awareness. It made me a better player to make sure I always knew where my teammates were and what my positioning should be. I was even able to co-ordinate fairly well with the pugs via text chat, really only lacking a way to designate focus fire targets. Now the mini-map is useless in most fights, and even on teamspeak, focus fire is often impossible because teammates often can't see the target letter that was called.
The bottom line is that the game wasn't ready for ECM because there wasn't enough communication in place to begin with. The C3 integration was botched for one simple reason: there was no way to find other players that were actively using it.
* My first suggestion is to add a lobby text chat so we can find each other for groups based on our own parameters.
* My second suggestion is to add a simple checkbox that says "Match with C3 users only." If pugs could match-up with other mic users, a lot of my gripes would go away very quickly. You're forcing us to either play a very not-fun 8 man group game, or play with pugs. It's not hard to fix it so we can talk to the pugs.
* My third suggestion is to add a way for the player that takes command to designate focus fire targets in a way that highlights them to teammates. It's not enough for a commander to be able to set a location on the map (which, btw, takes way too many clicks, and can't really be done while fighting). Add a single key press that designates the currently selected target as Primary target (and another key press that designates the currently selected target as a secondary target). Friendlies should all see a gold triangle over the primary target instead of a red triangle. The targeting box around it should also turn gold. Some other color could be used to mark secondary targets.
* My final suggestion is to, at least temporarily, pull ECM. It is, IMO, a step in the wrong direction for the game right now. A fun game is one that has multiple competing strategies in use, and ways to co-ordinate those strategies with your team. Since the addition of ECM, I have seen less co-ordination, and I have seen every match reduced to a single strategy: a ball of death where nobody scouts and the team sits scared hoping to have the best numbers on the front line when the enemy is found. That's not fun. For information warfare to be fun, we need MORE information. ECM is a step in the wrong direction because it reduces information.
Again, this isn't about being butt-hurt. I'm not losing matches; I'm just not having nearly as much fun anymore. Pretty much every match is the same now. Each starting position has 1 (some have 2) widely accepted opening moves. If you're on a 4 man team and try to call any other play, you're likely just abandoning your pugs and splitting your team. Once split, ECM makes it nearly impossible to regroup. It's impossible to communicate anything to pugs once the fighting starts because almost no pugs can pay attention to team text chat and fight at the same time.
In conclusion, add features that improve team communication and remove features that destroy team communication. You can't have information warfare without having information to begin with.
Farewell Mechwarrior. I hope your devs stop ignoring the community on ECM, and I hope they manage to turn this information gameplay trend in the other direction while there's still a community interested in the game.
Edited by TehCable, 15 January 2013 - 02:05 PM.
